Mushroom Cheese Boards

After reading about Kitty Shepherd's latest project, a mushroom pot, and remembering the multitude of mushrooms I photographed in Florida, I decided to make a couple of mushroom cheese boards. These pieces are made from the very last of the white stoneware clay. I decided to make more cheese boards with mushroom sketches. This first is Amanita muscari a colorful and psychoactive mushroom. Often in nature the color red denotes toxicity or a poison.

This cheese board illustrates morel mushrooms, highly favored and prized by cooks and gourmet connoisseurs. I've only seen one morel in the wild when I lived near Mount Lassen in California. Since there was only one, I left it there to reproduce. Thanks for reading and for all your comments.

Mountain Nest in a Cat Tin

Years ago we lived by Mount Lassen in the Cascade Mountains near Lake McCumber and Lassen Volcanic National Park from 1999 to 2002. We lived at the end of the road and had only one neighbor down the street whom we hardly ever saw. Sometimes we still dream about living there again; some places are special that way. We lived at 4500 foot elevation and summer night time temperatures dropped into the 60s. We never needed any air conditioning; we just opened our windows at night and let the cool air in and closed them in the morning to keep the hot air out. One day at a thrift store I found a cat tin. At the time the cat on the tin reminded me of my cat Binky so I bought it. (On the lower right side bar there's a photo of Binky; if you click on his photo you can read a story about him being lost in the snow at that time; how I got him back; a real miracle if there ever was one).

Our little house in the mountains was surrounded by massive Ponderosa pine, incense cedar, and Douglas fir trees towering above our home. One day after some high winds I was walking in the back yard and found a beautiful nest had fallen from a tree. I was mesmerized at the intricacy of the bird's nest building ability and decided to keep the nest and brought it into the house. I thought to store the nest in the cat tin afraid my cats might wreck havoc on the nest.

The bird had used twigs, lichen, and moss and had woven them into a wonderfully soft nest. As I was looking at the nest again today I noticed there must be hundreds of pieces in this nest and not one is larger than an inch. I thought about how many trips the bird must have made to build this nest. How much energy it took to build one simple, yet not so simple nest.

The other day I was reading Charlene's blog, Clay and Persimmons, she was building bird's nests out of clay and I was reminded of my mountain nest stored in this cat tin. Years after living near Mount Lassen we lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills in central California. I bought some plastic bird's eggs and placed them in the nest and put the nest in a manzanita branch I had in a pot on our back porch. When we moved I gave the manzanita branch away but I put the mountain nest back in the cat tin where it's been ever since.

When I took the nest out of the tin today to photograph it, I noticed the nest still has a forest fragrance, a mixture of pine, cedar, and fir, of lichen and moss, and a wonderful mountain freshness. That fragrance brought a little tear to my eye this morning, sometimes I miss living in the mountains so much. Thanks for reading and for all your comments.